wisdomofthecrowdsfandomcom-20200214-history
Article 1
Are We Wise About the Wisdom of Crowds? The Use of Group Judgements in Belief Revision This research provides the results of four studies which examine the influence of intuitions on group wisdom, and the informational influence of groups. When asking for advice, in general there are two paradigms used to describe the so-called intuitive combined strategies. The first paradigm is the panel-of-experts paradigm, in which “individuals form a judgement on the basis of two or more expert opinions” (Mannes, 2009, p. 1269). Previous research found that people tend to average the opinions, but make mistakes in the assignment of weights. The other paradigm is called the advice-taking paradigm, and entails that people update their prior beliefs with the opinion of one or more advisors. Again, people make mistakes in assigning weights. To be more precise, people favor their own prior beliefs and underweight advice. However, what was not included in both these paradigms is the effect of group judgements on individual beliefs. Potentially people respond differently when advice is given by a group rather than by an individual. As the phenomenon of the wisdom of crowds argues that group judgements are most often wiser than those of individuals, one would expect that group judgements should be more influential. This paper tries to understand this influence of group judgements within the advice-taking paradigm. Also, Mannes (2009) investigates the informational social influence, which refers to a permanent rather than temporary (normative social influence) internalization of the group’s judgement. In his article, Mannes argues that four hypotheses from different research are valid, and consequently aims to prove this by testing the assumptions in four different studies. The four hypotheses are the following: 1. In compliance with wisdom of crowds, people do believe group judgements are more accurate than individual judgements. Therefore, as groups grow wiser, meaning they increase in size, it is expected that people will place more weight on these group judgements. 2. However, there is also reason to predict that people will make suboptimal use of group judgements. This is mainly due to the bias people have in favor of one’s own beliefs. People are conservative in updating their beliefs. This is partly explained by the fact that one can only truly know the reasons for one’s own judgement, not others. Although people might, in principle, appreciate the wisdom of crowds, the bias will not (completely) disappear with group judgements. 3. Mannes also argues that when people indeed recognize the wisdom of crowds and place more weight on the group judgement, the validity of their revised beliefs will increase. 4. Lastly, the effect of suboptimal influence of groups in belief revision (hypothesis 2) will have larger consequences with larger groups. When advised by a group the contribution of one’s own belief is only marginal. Thus overweighting one’s own beliefs will lead to significant underperformance. Although people can recognize that validity increases as group size increases, they struggle with appreciating that the marginal contribution of a single additional opinion to a group, including their own, decreases rapidly, and even approaches zero. This article by Mannes (2009) shows that although wisdom of crowds can indeed increase one’s individual judgements, it is severely subject to the bias of overweighting one’s own beliefs. Meaning that in practice wisdom of crowds has less effect than it could have, looking at it from a purely theoretical perspective. How this is relevant in business can be seen from the increasing importance of the role that teams play in organizations nowadays. Unfortunately, the collective wisdom that this provides is still underappreciated. Mannes, A. E. (2009). Are we wise about the wisdom of crowds? The use of group judgments in belief revision. Management Science, 55(8), 1267-1279.